Aligning Product & Software Design

Abstract of a talk of Sandro Mancuso

Context

Average company

• Strong boundaries between Technical and Business

• Technical debt ?

  • Developers

    • "We don't have time to improve our system"

    • "We are struggling with technical debt"

      • Vicious circle

  • Business

    • "We need more features"

How to avoid that ?

• Problem ?

  • Project mindset

    • Get to that end

    • Great for something with a start and an end

    • Optimize the means to that end

• Software product

  • Continuous evolution

    • Not a great fit for project

    • Sequence of valuable increment

  • Should look at

    • Not only cost

    • Continuous investment

"There is a tension between the way we manage project and the way we manage product"

• Product strategy

  • Defined isolated from technology

  • Product backlog created

    • By the business

  • Only there the Dev team is coming in

    • Not part of the product definition

  • So the result = Reactive design

    • Do not have time to architect

    • End by begging for time

      • To refactor for example

• As developers

  • We must explain the value of designing software

  • Part of the meeting to contribute

    • BUT we don't know exactly HOW

  • We need to have something to add

    • Be able to explain Biz value of design

      • Not only to be able to organize our code

      • Can have a huge role

        • Examples

          • Enable different teams to work in parallel

          • Need to design our code to do so

          • Be able to automate -> for CD purpose

    • Enable the way that we need to work

Different levels of design

• Enterprise Architecture

  • How your product fits in a larger ecosystem

• Solutions Architecture

  • Solution of your product

  • How we re gonna do / split

• Technical Architecture

  • What technology

  • SLA

  • ...

• Macro Design

  • Components

  • Overall structure

• Micro Design

  • Classes

  • Functions

  • Methods

When we design ?

"We often struggle to find the time"

Understand Product design

• Looks a lot like Waterfall

  • Make it iterative

• Devs involved only in the development

  • Through the product backlog

  • Not able to create the technical strategy

    • Not have time here

1) Ideation

In startup product is part of the company

Build a vision for the product: NOT A PLAN

• A direction

  • Guiding our work

  • Create a context to offer services

Product Definition

Value Proposition Canvas

• Shape the scope of our product

• 1 canvas per customer segmentation

Technical Feasibility

• Build a technical vision

• Create a unified view with business & technology

Results

• Business & technology alignment

• Shared & more realistic product vision

• Context for pro-active & supportive tech strategy

2) Strategy

Create a roadmap

• Use Lean Startup approach

Create an architecture

• Define the technology stack

• Refine what has been done in Tech feasibility

• Design to support the way of the business

Results

• Common understanding of business & technical strategy

• Technical architecture created to support the business

• More realistic & sustainable product roadmap with Biz and tech

• High level modularisation makes it easier to plan

3) Planning

• Use the term Minimum Valuable Increment

  • Need to invest in technical things

Impact Mapping

• Validate the value towards the goal

• Validate the things we want to build by value

Generate your backlog from the Impact Mapping

Create a plan

• Achieve Continuous Delivery

• Several teams working in parallel

• Discover a lot of unknown

• Help to reshape our backlog

Results

• Technical effort, risks & dependencies impact prioritization of MVI's

• Easier to size MVI's when high level technical details are known

• Helps to distribute work across teams efficiently

• Technical solution designed to support Continuous Delivery (goal of Agile)

4) Development

• Design Apis from your mockup

  • Outside IN

  • What is the outside world expecting from us

Results

• Test & deployment strategies for each increment

• Enables CD

• Detailed design helps to identify risks, dependencies & unknown

• Enable safe evolution of the code

  • Keeping it maintainable

• Pro-active & continuous technical improvement aligned with biz value

  • Always improve

• Prevents accumulation of technical debt

Conclusion

• Often POs

  • They have

    • No good vision

    • Don't own it

    • Product definition is vague

  • Product roadmap

    • No milestones

    • Create a big plan

    • Rigid product backlog

  • From High level strategy to Product backlog

• Architects

  • Architecture are created without biz inputs

  • No connection with dev teams

• Introduce technical milestones to balance the graph

• Make sure than each phases are done

  • with Biz & technology

  • As a single team

"In a software product, software design should be an explicit part of the business strategy"

The talk